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New drivers lock up my Sandy Bridge laptop - what to do?

Hi,

a while ago I installed the Steam and while I can play some Indy titles on my HP 2560p with Intel i5-2540M, Steam always nags me about adding the x-swat PPA for the Intel driver. When this is done and the laptop is restarted, it will boot and show the Plymouth(?) bootlogo and the mouse pointer. And nothing else. The mouse can't be moved, the keyboard does not react.
The same happens when booting up any Ubuntu 13.04-version.

How can I figure out what is wrong here and submit a proper bugreport? What information will be needed?

I'd just like to add that I'm also having problems. Intel Nehalem(?) (i7-640M, at any rate). I'm using the xorg-edgers repo rather than x-swat. Ubuntu 12.10 with a stable Cinnamon release.

After messing with combinations of i915.i915_enable_rc6 and i915.i915_enable_fbc for a while, I've finally tried i915.enable_hangcheck=0 plus i915.i915_enable_rc6=3 and i915.i915_enable_fbc=1. Disabling FBC appears to cause strange drawing artifacts at times; so far while apparently switching video modes during boot or passing control from vts to X.Org or the like. The artifacts do disappear after drawing control is finished moving from whatever to whatever.

It's too early to say whether this is actually working, but nothing's killed Cinnamon this time... so far. Is the hang-check code actually bugged? I'm nervous having it disabled. I have a late C2D laptop where Windows DWM has to kill off the Intel driver periodically... and it's actually a stable machine.

Is anyone else using a 3.7 kernel and xserver-xorg-video-intel > 2.14 or so? Successfully?

a while ago I installed the Steam and while I can play some Indy titles on my HP 2560p with Intel i5-2540M, Steam always nags me about adding the x-swat PPA for the Intel driver. When this is done and the laptop is restarted, it will boot and show the Plymouth(?) bootlogo and the mouse pointer. And nothing else. The mouse can't be moved, the keyboard does not react.
The same happens when booting up any Ubuntu 13.04-version.

How can I figure out what is wrong here and submit a proper bugreport? What information will be needed?

I just experienced this after downgrading from the 3.7 xorg-edgers kernel to the latest official Quantal kernel. I'm not clear that it's a driver bug. If it is, here's the workaround:

Switch to another vts (Ctrl+Alt+1 through 6 by default). Log in. Restart lightdm or whatever other login manager you're using. You should have a complete X display and login screen. Don't forget to switch back to the vts and log out.